Pages

Thursday, May 22, 2008

In which it all goes together but not exactly

I firmly believe most men don't understand women's clothing. I mean your average man. Not your Project Runway "drapes like an angel" designer guy.

Which is fine; they don't need to. Unless of course they're cross-dressers. In which case, well, honestly, I'm not even sure what to say about that. Anyway. It's fine.

Except that sometimes, I need some help.

This is one of several areas in which I think lesbians have it made. You always have another woman around to help with your outfit. You could wear each other's clothes. It would be great.

But that's also a huge tangent and nowhere near my point.

We don't have a full-length mirror at Nick's, so I never exactly know what I look like till I get to the bathroom at work.

Mostly it's fine. I seem to wear the same things over and over anyway. Or I wear something that goes with black boots or shoes and don't have to worry about color matching.

The only part I sometimes get nervous about is when I venture into trying to match browns, or brown with other colors, and I'm uncertain. Because Nick is color-blind, and so he genuinely can't tell if this goes with that, colorishly speaking.

Plus, I have decided that while he has nice taste, and he's conservative, so I'll never run off to work all tarty, men just can't be trusted when they tell you something looks fine.

And you know how sometimes you're trying to figure out if you can pull something off and you're not sure? It might be cool, but it also might be dumb? It might work really well, but if it doesn't, it really doesn't?

That's where you need a woman. Or a full length mirror.

Because, here's what I did the other day. I bought these grey 3/4 length cuffed pants, quite fitted, at Banana recently. They're cotton and stretch and comfy, but sharp. A good weight for spring, but dark enough grey to be worn with a wool sweater and not look weird. I paired them with a fitted waist-length black sweater set.

And then I was trying to figure out shoes, and since this week was cold, I chose black boots. And since I still have a lot of my clothes at home, I donned the only pair of black boots I had at Nick's. They're flat, with a square toe, and they have two straps on the calf.

I got them in England several years ago, and I call them my Tough Girl boots because I think I totally look like I could kick someone's ass in them. The ass of someone short. And little. But still. (I have been told, incidentally, that I never look like I could kick someone's ass. But if that's what I want to call the boots, that's cool.)

"How does this look?"

"Great!"

Since I liked every piece of the outfit, I felt good walking out the door. Nice pants, conservative sweater, good boots.

We drove into the city, and were almost at the door of his office building when he said, "I really like that look."

6 comments:

this is the second post i've read today that mentions cross-dressers... i think everyon is ready for a long weekend

and M doesn't have a full-length mirror either. i usually stand on the bed to see the bottom half of the outfit and then put it with the top half in my head. sometimes i have to jump up and down to really see it all together.

notsojenny - Oh my goodness you are not kidding - I need a three day weekend so badly! I love the idea of you jumping up and down to see your outfit. I don't have anywhere to do half and half, unless I climb up on the sink.

lacochran - I think we just need to buy one that goes on the back of a door and takes no space. I do too much of "this seemed like a good idea when I put it on". Heh.

We have an extra full length mirror if you want it! We can pack it for our visit...really...

And W has done this to me before. And I have a mirror, but it was one of those occasions where I just couldn't really SEE myself. I didn't know until I looked at pictures of an event that I was wearing an outfit that literally made me look square ... as in the shape.

The English have come up with the ideal solution for this. In some of the upscale department stores like Harvey Nichols, they have a "men's creche" with Plasma TVs showing sports, a bar, and free snacks.

This works perfectly because our opinions and taste are horrible that is when it's not a tremendous bother to offer an opinion.